Why Did God Let Our Neighbors’ Homes Burn Down? Talking to our Kids about Why God Allows Natural Evil

By Leslie Godwin

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; 
then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.
-- 1 Cor 13:12
 
 
Parent:“Let’s pray for the people who lost their houses and for those who died in the fires.”
 
Child:“What good would that do? God let it happen. He isn’t listening.”
 
    I think that every religious parent has had this conversation with their child at some point. In fact, most adults have this conversation with God from time to time.
 
Human: “OK, God, why did you spare our home and nine of our neighbors lost theirs?”
 
God: “So it’s my fault their homes burned down?”
 
Human: “You do perform miracles now and then, right? Why not make it rain and put out the fire before lives and homes were lost?”
 
God: “Would it help to say that someday you’ll understand? You’ve heard the analogy of the tapestry? You see it from the back, so you see the loose threads and the muted colors, and the design is hard to pick out. But from my point of view, it is beautiful and perfect.”
 
Human: “I saw that episode of Daredevil. I get the tapestry, but when it comes to someone’s home or worse, their life, it’s hard to be satisfied with the tapestry analogy.”
 
One of the reasons I love the Catholic Church is that Her answers to serious questions are deep ones that stand up to intellectual scrutiny, as well as understanding by faith and obedience. The hardest challenge for Christians to defend is how could a good, all-powerful God allow evil. But as a wise person once said, “We Christians have to explain evil. Atheists have to explain everything else.”
 
There are two kinds of evil. Moral evil in which we freely choose to do the wrong thing. And natural evil, which includes sickness, accidents and wildfires. Moral evil is more unfair, you could say, because it means that people have to suffer for no good reason. When someone goes to the   Borderline Bar in Thousand Oaks and shoots as many young people as they can, that is completely under the control of the perpetrator who is creating suffering and pain. If that individual didn’t take that action, those people and their loved ones and communities would not be suffering.
 
Natural evil is easier to explain because it makes logical sense that God created an ordered universe with laws that we can understand. But the question we all have is why does God only rarely intervene, and why does He allow such terrible suffering if He could prevent it? The Catechism explains it this way: “But why did God not create a world so perfect that no evil could exist in it? …. But with infinite wisdom and goodness God freely willed to create a world ‘in a state of journeying’ toward its ultimate perfection. In God’s plan this process of becoming involves …both constructive and destructive forces of nature. With physical good there exists also   physical evil as long as creation has not reached perfection.” [CCC 310]
 
My son has heard the response about free will often enough that he anticipates what I’ll say. “I know, I know, God allows us free will. But what about fires? Either He is still there for us, or He created the world and now he’s playing video games and forgot about us.” As scientist-theologian John Polkinghorne points out, “God has created a universe with particular natural laws that make life on earth possible so that humans with free will can exist in the first place. As an example, the same weather systems that create tornadoes that kill humans also create thunderstorms that provide our environment with the water needed for human existence.” [  ColdCaseChristianity.com]
 
It’s even harder for kids to understand the idea of evil as the lack or absence of goodness, as St. Thomas Aquinas described. ”For evil is the absence of the good.” (  Summa Theologica, Question 49 Article 1) It is frustrating as a parent that it’s so hard to provide satisfying answers to our children about something as important and as ubiquitous as evil that they can easily grasp. Many children can understand some examples, however, like the idea that a cavity in their tooth is a hole, not the presence of something sharp and painful. As they get older, if we can guide them to have a relationship with God, they will also encounter the depth of the answers the Church has been exploring and teaching for over two thousand years. 
 
      What Catholics DON’T believe:

1. God causes evil to punish us. We’ve heard well-known Christians say that the Northridge earthquake was God’s punishment for the porn industry being prevalent in the San Fernando Valley in Southern California. Or that New Orleans was flooded during Hurricane Katrina because of Mardi Gras and Satanic leanings of some who live there. God is Goodness and doesn’t “take out His wrath” on us. There are statements in the Old Testament that might phrase events in that language, but it is likely that the human authors were describing scenarios that would help readers understand how bad things were using God’s “emotional reaction” to make the point a little more emphatically. God cannot regret His decisions, nor does He lose His temper. He is unchangeable and not prone to mood swings like humans are.
2. If we just prayed more fervently or sincerely, God would have spared, cured, or otherwise saved us. This is basically using prayer in a superstitious way. There is not a one-to-one correspondence between praying a rosary or wearing a scapular and being cured of cancer. Neither do you die if you don’t pray the rosary or wear the scapular. We are told that we are not to believe in superstition [CCC 2116].
3. God causes disasters to make it more likely that we would turn to Him. This is a variation on the “there are no atheists in foxholes” idea -- if you are faced with a life-threatening situation, you will be more be more likely turn to God for help. This clearly doesn’t take into account the many who give up on their faith and God when confronted by disasters. 

While it would be good for us now (and for eternity) to turn to God for help, and God can use temptation or suffering for our greater good, that doesn’t mean that God regularly makes us suffer so that we will turn to Him. Rather, God can take a terrible situation and create good out of it. So if we are suffering and choose to turn to Him for solace and guidance and Grace, He has offered us something good among the suffering that we couldn’t have created on our own. 
 
We Catholics are told to read the Bible as a whole and not pick out a phrase or a concept divorced from the entirety of Sacred Scripture. We must also understand evil in relationship to all of the Church’s teachings, Scripture, and Tradition. As parents, we use daily events and reactions to those events as a way to teach our children how to do God’s will. In a mysterious way, God uses all of our experiences and reactions to them to lead us closer to Him, to do His work here, and so that we may be with Him for eternity in Heaven when we leave this world. The Catechism puts it this way,  “There is not a single aspect of the Christian message that is not in part an answer to the question of evil.” [CCC309]
    
 
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Helpful articles/video on the topic of natural evil:
 
The Problem of Natural Evil by Stephen Beale
 
St. Thomas Aquinas on the cause of evil
 
Bishop Barron’s video on God, Tsunamis, and the Problem of Evil: